The Stoics on Matter and Prime Matter: '
Corporealism' and the Imprint of Plato's Timaeus.
Teske contextualizes these crucial discoveries and subsequent contributions made by Augustine by reminding readers that until Augustine encountered Ambrose and the Christian community in Milan, western Christianity was largely informed by Stoic
corporealism and vestiges of Manichaean materialism.
Martin, "the problems of anthropomorphism and
corporealism lay at the heart of the disputes about God in Islamic theology." (64) The theological problem has always in some way been related to the scriptural representations of God.
What I miss in this study of the dialogues is an awareness of the importance of the libri Platonicorum to the early Augustine's transition from Stoic and Manichaean
corporealism to a spiritualist metaphysics.
This
corporealism must also take into account the management of international populations through biopolitics in creating, classifying, and policing specific kinds of international bodies, and the way in which political technologies of individuals such as passports, visas, and frontier control educate mobile subjectivities in kinds of obedience and auto-confession.
correctly emphasizes the importance of Augustine's understanding of eternity and time, but she does not, it seems, recognize that Augustine was the first thinker in the Latin West to adopt such Plotinian accounts of eternity and time, just as he was the first--apart from a small circle in Milan--to break out of the common Stoic
corporealism of the age and to adopt a Plotinian spiritualist metaphysics.
Indeed, if one ponders the remark further, one sees that the scientists' claim for the truth of
corporealism must, on their own premises, by dubious at best; for all claims to truth require that mind have at least epistemic independence from the flux of dumb matter.